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Monday, 5 November 2018

Preview: Blithe Spirit st Newcastle People’s Theatre

"Why shouldn't I have fun? I died young, didn't I!"

Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward

Newcastle People’s Theatre

Tuesday
13th - Saturday 17th November 2018

Successful, happily married writer Charles
Condomine wishes to learn about the occult for a novel he's writing.

But when he arranges a seance at his house, the
dotty medium Madame Arcati inadvertently summons the spirit of Charles's first
wife Elvira - surely the most flippant ghost in literature - and hilarious
marital mayhem ensues!

Coward wrote Blithe Spirit in a week in the Spring
of 1941. It opened at London's Piccadilly Theatre six weeks later where
audiences loved it and it ran a record-setting 1,997 performances. This
'light comedy about death' clearly warmed the hearts of wartime
theatregoers, themselves carrying on in a city under constant threat of attack.

Dubbed an 'improbable farce in three acts' Blithe Spirit was the longest running hit of Coward's career and went on to be made
into a film in 1945 starring Rex Harrison as Charles and Margaret Rutherford as
Madame Arcati. The film won an Oscar for its visual effects.

Packed with all of Coward's trademark wit, Blithe Spirit's spectral variation on the love triangle is an evergreen comedy of
manners that will brighten up any dark Autumn evening!